Page 29 of Edge of Danger

Ian’s movements were sharp, almost angry, as he jerked on clothes and started throwing gear and supplies into a reinforcednylon duffel bag. She pressed up onto a surprised elbow. He looked like he was packing. In a hurry.

“Going somewhere?” she asked cautiously.

“Getting the hell out of town before one of the many bad guys out there finds me and puts a bullet in my head. If you had the sense of a flea, you’d be doing the same thing.”

Stung, she sat up and threw her feet over the side of the bed. Quickly, she retrieved her lingerie and yanked it on, followed by her clothes. Damned if she would let him get the last word and accuse her of having no sense. She twisted her hair up on top of her head and jammed her slouchy hat over it, snatched up her rifle, and paused as she reached his door.

As brusquely as she could muster past her hurt at his abrupt attitude shift, she remarked, “It’s been fun, McCloud. Don’t run into a bullet with your name on it.”

She made it downstairs and nearly a full block from his hooch before the tears came.

What an ass. He’d loved her into oblivion and then all but thrown her out of his bed. She was no more than a casual lay to him.

Well, dammit, he’d been no more than that to her, either. So there. To hell with him.

She dashed away the tears that would give away her disguise as a man and stormed back to her apartment. She wassodone with him. Ian McCloud could rot.

“Missy McCloud?” a scratchy voice asked.

Piper started. Looked around. And spotted the blind charwoman. “Mala. I’m glad I ran into you. Here is yourmelaya.”

She fished the voluminous garment out of her backpack and hoped the woman had not been cold overnight without it. Surreptitiously, she wrapped a half-dozen of her high-calorie protein bars inside the cloth, along with the handful of localcoins that had amassed at the bottom of her bag during her stay in Sudan.

“Fatima. She have message for you.” The old woman gestured with her bony, dry hand for Piper to come closer. “She send t’anks fo’ shots and food. She say white men you lookin’ fo’ be goin’ south. Ragala Village.”

“Where’s that?” Piper asked, startled.

“Beyond Talodi. Bad country, ‘dat.”

“How so?”

“Peoples die mo’ often ‘dan live when ‘dey go into ‘dat bush. You no follow. You send Mr. Ian. Yah?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll ask him to go for me.”

“You stay heah’. You be safe ‘ere in ‘de big city.”

God almighty. If Kahrtoum’s warring slums were safe, she would hate to see Mala’s idea of dangerous.

“Go on, now. Git off street. Bad men, ‘dey lookin’ for you. Stay in house for a few days, yes?”

“Yes, of course” she answered distractedly. “Bad men looking for me? Which ones?”

The charwoman cackled a little crazily, unnerving Piper more than she cared to admit. “All of ‘dem, chile. All of ‘dem. Dey’s coming for you.”

7

Ian slapped at a biting fly and tucked his camo-mosquito netting a little more tightly against the ground. Hard to believe he could prefer sitting on a broiling Khartoum rooftop to anyplace in the world, but sitting in sweltering African bush with no breeze, among the snakes and biting, crawling critters, was actually worse.

At least he had the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten Piper to leave Khartoum before she ran so afoul of the locals that one of them killed her. She was probably stateside by now, eating American fast food and sitting in her air-conditioned home watching pre-season football games. Lucky bitch.

Aww, who was he kidding? He was glad she was safe. He’d worried about her the whole time she was in Khartoum. That town was no place for a lady.

Doing his best to block out the physical misery of this surveillance op, he wiped sweat off the rubber cups of his binoculars for the hundredth time and put them back against his face. The house that came into focus looked wildly misplaced in the middle of the African bush.

The white, two-story, clapboard structure with broad verandas and a bright metal roof could not be more out ofplace in this sub-Saharan clime. It looked like a Dutch colonial homestead that had blown in on awahdi, a great Saharan sandstorm, and been dropped in this little clearing by accident.

What the hell it was doing out here in the middle of nowhere was anybody’s guess. Maybe a leftover of the colonial period when these lands were ruled by Europeans.

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